Every Sunday, Clara sat at her grandmother's old writing desk and wrote letters.
Not to anyone specific. Not to anyone at all, really.
She wrote to the version of her mother who might have survived the accident. She wrote to her first love, the one who got away and then got away again. She wrote to herself at sixteen, when she was so certain of everything and so completely wrong.
The letters went into a wooden box that had no bottom - at least, that's what it felt like. Clara never sealed them. She would write, fold the paper carefully, and place it in the box. Sometimes the paper stayed. Sometimes it disappeared, leaving only the faint scent of lavender or rain or woodsmoke.
She never knew where the letters went.
Her therapist said it was healthy, this ritual. A way of processing. Clara wasn't sure it was processing. It felt more like planting seeds in a garden that existed only in her imagination.
One Sunday, she wrote a letter to her grandmother. Not the grandmother who had died, leaving her the desk. The grandmother who had died before Clara was born, the one in the photographs with kind eyes and strong hands.
I'm doing okay, Clara wrote. I'm still figuring things out, but I think you would be proud of me.
She placed the letter in the box.
The next morning, she found a letter in her mailbox. It was old, the paper yellowed, the handwriting achingly familiar from the photographs.
The letter said: I am proud of you, Clara. I have always been proud of you.
Clara never wrote to that grandmother again. She didn't need to.
But she still writes every Sunday. To everyone else. To no one at all.